The Song Reader (36 page)

I was weaker than my brother; perhaps this was why it was easier for me to sympathize with Father’s worries. I was only two years old when I developed what Grandma called my “nervous breathing,” and what the doctor called an anxiety disorder. My heart would pound at a hundred and eighty beats per minute or more, and my breath would develop a frantic rhythm to match. Father taught me how to control it, so I wouldn’t lose consciousness, but still, the horrible feelings of dizziness and panic were something I could never entirely forget, and they lurked in even my happiest moments, like snakes poised to strike.

We lived on thirty-five acres that straddled the border of Colorado and New Mexico, more than twenty miles from the nearest town. The four of us—Father, Grandma, Jimmy and me—were survivalists. That’s what the local preacher said anyway, when he came for a visit to see what we were up to, and went away convinced, without ever stepping foot inside, that our father knew what he was about.

After he left, Father laughed. Each month, we ordered nearly everything we needed from Colorado Springs: three freezerfuls of food that arrived on the first Tuesday in a clean white truck. “Survivalists?” he said. “We wouldn’t survive twenty-four hours without the delivery man.”

Father could joke and laugh, but the grown-up Jimmy had forgotten all about that side of him. “He’s a nut,” my brother would say, and I would sigh. This was about a year before Jimmy left, for good as it turned out, though only Father suspected he wouldn’t be returning. I thought he would come running back as soon as he realized what the world was like; I even tried to convince him in my letters that he was putting himself in danger, though of course I had no proof of this, and he laughed off all my fears. He wrote that he was surrounded by normal people doing normal things, like working and falling in love, things he himself was planning to do now that he had finally “escaped” from the Sanctuary at the ripe old age of twenty-three.

The Sanctuary was Father’s name for our home.

We’d lived there as long as I could remember, though Jimmy claimed that he vividly remembered the time before, in California, when our mother was still alive. I was four when we left, he was six; maybe he did remember. Maybe everything he said was true: that we’d lived near the ocean in a house on a hill with a whole room just to watch movies in; that he’d gone to first grade with other children, and watched cartoons on television, and flown in airplanes to other countries, and rode at the front of a parade on Thanksgiving Day. He even got to stay outside until he was sunburned, he said, because a sunburn wasn’t a big deal to our mother. She said a sunburn gave you rosy cheeks and little freckles across your nose and all you had to do was put on spray and it didn’t hurt anymore.

Father would never allow us to stay outside for more than twenty minutes at a time. He would sit on our wide porch with his watch in his hand. “Sunburns can give you skin cancer,” he said. “I’m sorry, children, but we have to be on the safe side.”

Jimmy’s first rebellion was pretending to be sick during lessons and then climbing out of his bedroom window so he could stand in the sun all morning. At first, Father thought Jimmy’s redness was due to a terrible fever from his flu. When he realized the truth, he was so surprised he collapsed in the chair by Jimmy’s bed, head in hands. Then Jimmy was sorry. He was only eleven years old; he still wanted to please our father.

Grandma said this rebellion would pass, but it didn’t, obviously. As he grew to be a teenager, the things we’d accepted all our lives were suddenly unacceptable. Why hadn’t we gone to school like normal children? Why did the doctor always come to our place? Why didn’t we have a television like everyone else in the world? Why did we have to learn everything from old textbooks and an ancient set of encyclopedias? Why had we never left this stupid Sanctuary? Father got to go to town sometimes—he had a Land Rover just for such trips—why wouldn’t he take us with him? What was wrong with him anyway?

It shocked me to hear my brother talk like this. Father had taken such good care of us for so long, and personally, I felt sorry for him, having to do it all with only Grandma to help. I often thought if only our mother was there, everything would have been much better, though the truth was the only thing I really remembered about her was her hair: long and fiery red, like Jimmy’s. There were no pictures of her in the house; Grandma said it was because Father couldn’t bear to see them. Neither Father nor Grandma would tell us how she died. Jimmy didn’t remember either, but he said it must have been really awful, or why else did our father become so strange?

“He’s no stranger than the Amish,” I retorted during one of these arguments, sticking an encyclopedia volume in Jimmy’s face, already open to a page on the Amish people of Pennsylvania. I was thirteen and I was ready. “At least we have electric lights!”

Jimmy frowned. “We don’t have a religion.”

I wasn’t sure about this. Father said we were “lapsed Catholics,” but Jimmy said that meant no longer Catholic, which meant no longer anything.

“So?” I said.

“The reason the Amish live like that is they believe it’s what God wants. That’s not what Father thinks at all. He thinks the people in town are evil monsters we have to stay away from.”

“He never said that.”

“Oh come on, Thea. You know how he talks about how corrupt the world is. What do you think he means? The dogs and cats and horses?”

Jimmy was rolling his eyes like I was a fool. Perhaps I was, but Father was not, of this I was certain. If he said the world was corrupt, then it had to be true. No matter how innocent the dusty road to town appeared, there was something out there, something unspeakably terrible and cruel. There had to be, or why would Father work so hard to keep us away from it?

It helped that Grandma took my side. She’d lived in California her entire life, but she never missed it. She said the world was a bad place that had made me sick and nearly destroyed our father. “You’re lucky he bought this Sanctuary for you,” Grandma said. She was in the kitchen, cooking as usual. We had Mrs. Rosa, our housekeeper, for weekly cleaning, but Grandma herself prepared all our meals. She never let me help her. Father didn’t want me to get cut or burned; he thought it might bring on one of my attacks. “I hate to think what would have happened if he hadn’t,” Grandma concluded, and I nodded.

The unknown was always more frightening than the familiar, and the Sanctuary was familiar. Why didn’t Jimmy see this too? The Sanctuary was a safe place for us all. We had very good books, old though they may have been. We had a beautiful piano, and a record player with hundreds of records, also old, but many great songs. We had fields of flowers to gaze at (but not walk through, in case of bees). We had a father who loved us more than life itself, and who had taught us algebra and geometry, Shakespeare and Spenser, the history of the world (up until 1960, when Father said the culture became so decadent that even learning about it could harm a child’s spirits), biology and physics and geography.

Our own nearest town, Tuma, New Mexico, we knew only by the address on our mail. It was too small to be on any of the maps in Father’s library. Too small to be interesting, I told Jimmy, when he complained about wanting to go and see it for himself.

Part of me did understand Jimmy’s longings, especially when I found myself wondering how I would ever fall in love. I’d never known a boy, never had a kiss, never even had a crush, though sometimes my stomach would do a strange flip when I saw a picture of a handsome man in our encyclopedia. My favorites were John Keats, F. Scott Fitzgerald and an unnamed Civil War soldier with the most mournful expression. When I was about fourteen, I made up a story about the soldier, ending with his arrival at our front door to ask for my hand in marriage. It was a silly daydream, but it cheered me. Father said I had an optimistic temperament, and maybe it was true. Certainly I never gave up hope that the man of my future would arrive when the time was right, though how that would happen, I couldn’t say.

To Jimmy, my optimism was just annoying.

“You’re so conservative,” he told me once. He was older then: eighteen, nineteen. I was older too, but I hadn’t changed, which of course was the point.

“Conservative means to hold on to what you have.” My voice was firm. “I see nothing wrong with that.”

I didn’t realize Father was standing right behind me until I heard his quiet laugh, but I was glad I could give this to him. Nearly every day, he had to listen to Jimmy’s complaints. He’d been a patient teacher throughout our childhood and he was patient now, almost to a fault. He’d let Jimmy yell at him, yet he never raised his own voice. And he always apologized to Jimmy. He said he’d done the best he could, but maybe it wasn’t enough. All he’d wanted was to protect us, and that’s all he still wanted.

“I hope you understand,” Father would say softly. He was a tall man with well-defined features and thick eyebrows over deep blue-gray eyes framed by his ever-present black glasses; I’d always thought he was as distinguished as any of the presidents in our encyclopedia. But lately, he’d begun to look tired: his eyes haunted and his shoulders stooped with what I knew was the weight of his only son’s rebellion.

Half the time Jimmy said—or shouted—“No, I don’t understand,” and ended the conversation by stomping out of the room.

If Grandma hadn’t gotten sick, Jimmy probably would have left even sooner. He was twenty-one, of legal age to do as he wished, as he liked to say (constantly); maybe he was just waiting for the right moment. On the other hand, maybe he would have made his peace with Father if Grandma hadn’t gotten sick and suddenly decided that Father had been wrong for taking us away from California, after all.

I turned against her then, I have to confess. Not that she ever knew. I remained kind to Grandma until the end, and it wasn’t hard because I did love her. But I loved Father a thousand times more, and I quickly decided that Grandma’s sick-bed revelations were no different from the ramblings of a lunatic.

Even Dr. Humphrey, the town’s doctor, said Grandma’s mind was going faster than her body. The diagnosis, inoperable cancer, had been confirmed by tests at the hospital in Pueblo. She left in an ambulance, and returned the same way, a week later, to die at home with her family. She was eighty-six years old, and they predicted she wouldn’t last more than a month or two, but she lingered for over a year. During that year, she spent most of her time talking about the past.

Jimmy listened eagerly as she transformed California from a terribly corrupt place from which we were lucky to have escaped to a gorgeous land of sandy beaches and palm trees and sunsets reflecting gold and purple on the water. And oh, Grandma said, such fun things there were to do! Strolling the pier at Santa Monica and riding on the huge Ferris wheel. Driving in the canyon with all the twists and turns and beautiful views. Sipping a glass of wine by the side of the pool. Watching the filming of a movie on the studio lot. Taking the kids to Disneyland.

“Remember that, Fred?” Grandma would say to Father, after she’d sung the praises of another wonderful thing about the place she was now calling our “home.” He would sit on the side of her bed and take her hand—and I would look at Jimmy and raise my eyebrows. Our father’s name was Charles. If Grandma couldn’t remember her own son’s name, why should anything else she said be taken seriously?

One night Jimmy had the nerve to suggest that maybe Charles wasn’t his name. I pointed out that Grandma had always called Father Charles, but Jimmy wasn’t persuaded. “Maybe Grandma was in on it too,” Jimmy said. “Maybe now she’s finally telling the truth.”

We were standing outside on the porch. It was a cold night in January, so naturally I had on my coat and hat and gloves and warmest boots. Jimmy, on the other hand, was wearing only his light sweater and blue denim pants. He had decided Father’s rule about dressing warmly was as pointless as all his other rules.

“You realize that you’re calling him a liar,” I whispered. My heart was racing a little, but I was taking deep breaths and reminding myself that Jimmy could not possibly mean this. It was just his rebellion talking.

Jimmy was rubbing his hands together vigorously, stomping his feet, shivering a little. But he would not concede he needed his coat.

“I don’t want to believe it either,” he said. But then he added, “What makes you so sure he’s not?”

I could have given him a hundred reasons, yet in the end, I knew it came down to trust. I had trusted our father for my entire life. He had never done anything to make me question that trust.

“He has a driver’s license,” I finally said. We had both seen it, not often, but enough times to know it said “Charles O’Brien.”

This was what it took to convince my brother that our father hadn’t lied about his own name. It struck me as very sad.

During Grandma’s last few months she became even more incoherent. She would talk of her own childhood as though it were happening now, even calling out in the most heartbroken voice for her mother and father. I felt so sorry for her, but Jimmy persisted in believing that somewhere in her talk he would find the key to understanding all the mysteries of our family. He even tried asking Grandma how our mother died (when Father was holed up in his study, doing his monthly accounting), but poor Grandma took the question as another opportunity to cry over all the people she’d lost over her long life. Whether she was crying about Mother too wasn’t clear. Jimmy swore she said Helena, our mother’s name, but I thought he only imagined it.

Actually, the only time I heard her talk about our mother, Jimmy wasn’t there. He was downstairs helping Father haul wood; I was reading to Grandma when, out of the blue, she patted my hand and said, “You know, your mother would be very proud of what a fine woman you’re turning out to be.”

I admit I took this a bit more seriously than the rest of Grandma’s talk. In fact, a few minutes later, when Grandma started crying again, I found myself crying along with her, thinking about my mother, this red-haired Helena whom I could barely remember. The idea that she would be proud of me was so wonderful, and yet, I didn’t think it was true. I had read of heroic women in the encyclopedia: women like Florence Nightingale, Joan of Arc, Harriet Tubman. My accomplishments so far were limited to keeping myself from any injuries beyond the rare paper cut, reading most of the books in Father’s small library and playing the piano, not particularly well. I had never had to face adversity; I had never even had to make a conscious choice that mattered to anyone but myself. What was I then but a grown-up-size little girl?